


Target Practice

by night_swimming



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Shooting lessons, camp counselor!Cassian, sassy and unhelpful!Jyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 07:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14539452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/night_swimming/pseuds/night_swimming
Summary: Cassian is given a temporary on-base assignment which he deals with in a very Cassian sort of way. Jyn comes along partially to help, mostly to make sure someone is able to tease him about it later.Loosely based on personal experiences as a summer camp counselor many years ago.





	Target Practice

“But sir,” he said, trying to hide his frustration, “there have to be a number of more qualified individuals that can…”

“Believe me there are, but everyone has been asked to pitch in,” Draven cut him off. “Besides, you’ve been cutting it close on your psych evals and they keep pestering me to give you more low-stress tasks.”

Cassian stood for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “What should I… _do_ … with them?”

“Anything. Just keep them occupied,” Draven responded.

“Anything?”

“For kriff sake Andor they don’t have security clearance, if I catch you using them to sift through data for your reports…”

“Ok, ok!” Cassian held up his hands and backed out of the room.

\- - - - -

That night, Jyn had actual tears in her eyes from laughter when he told her about his new assignment.

“I wish I could take a holovid of this,” she said, catching her breath. “I’m coming too, I wouldn’t miss this for anything. Plus you’ll need someone to step in if they start to get unruly.”

“Thanks for the support,” Cassian said, throwing his jacket at her from across their quarters. 

\- - - - -

“But how do you know which eye is your dominant eye?”

“What if both of mine are dominant?”

“Can I get an eyepatch that says ‘DOMINANT’ on it?”

“Ooh I want one too!”

The barrage of questions flew at him, the askers not really looking for answers but instead enjoying the process capturing their instructor’s attention for a few seconds. The children clung to and near him, holding out their arms and making small triangles with the crook of their hands between their thumbs and forefingers. They hung on his every word, brimming with barely contained excitement. Cassian suppressed a smile as he explained again how to make a small triangle with their hands.

“Pick something nearby and look at it through the triangle,” he continued. “Now, close one eye, and then the other. When you look through the triangle with one eye, you will still be able to see the object. When you look through the other eye, the object will have moved. The eye that can still see the object through the triangle is your dominant eye.”

Cassian demonstrated again while talking, holding his arms up and focusing on one of the targets suspended downrange. The children squealed with delight as they figured it out for themselves, shouting and talking over each other with their discovery and new-found piece of their identity.

He truthfully hadn’t expected to enjoy this as much as he was. An apparent mix-up with transport assignments in the last personnel transfer had sent the individual that normally looked after the children on base halfway across the galaxy. They were due to arrive at the end of the week but until then Ops was scrambling to keep the children occupied and in one piece. Cassian, on base for a month or so in-between missions, was given the “after lunch” shift until someone from ground support staff was scheduled to relive him. 

\- - - - -

Jyn sat on the edge of the shooting platform, grinning at the scene unfolding around her. She already knew which of her eyes was dominant but couldn’t help herself and raised her hands to frame Cassian’s face between her overlapped thumbs and forefingers. Slowly opening and closing each eye, Cassian’s head popped in and out of view. He caught her doing it and rolled his eyes at her. _I hope you’re having fun,_ the eye-roll said. She waved her fingers back at him. 

\- - - - -

Cassian spent the entire first hour discussing how to safely use the small pump-action air rifles he’d dug up from the back of a dusty service closet that morning. He patiently explained and re-explained how to safely load the rifles with small metal pellets, how to hold the rifles without putting out an eye, and the voice commands they needed to understand before anyone was allowed to shoot _anything_. Once he’d covered just enough to make the group overly cautious when handling the rifles, Cassian announced they were ready to start shooting. Cheering ensued. 

He set them up in pairs along the length of the wooden platform, one partner to observe and one to shoot. Each pair took turns releasing a dozen or so shots at their target – a small, datapad-sized piece of paper with concentric circles alternating black and white. The smallest circle at the center was no bigger than a thumbnail. 

Cassian moved among them, gently correcting positions and postures, stepping in when a muzzle drifted too far sideways while being refilled between rounds. 

“Rifle tips must always be pointed downrange,” he reminded the group as he turned a pair of small shoulders away from their partner. 

Pairs switched back and forth over the next hour, collecting targets only after everyone enthusiastically yelled _clear_ when Cassian asked if they’d emptied their chamber and engaged the safety. Children groaned and laughed as they retrieved their targets – more than a few managed to hit the paper but only a small percentage of shots lay anywhere near the center, generally due to luck rather than skill. 

\- - - - -

A few of the younger children brought their targets to Jyn between rounds, glowing with pride and eager to show someone what they’d done.

“Look I hit here, and here, and here, and this one is almost in this circle…” they explained excitedly, one after another.

“This is really great,” she responded, leaning in close as if they were sharing a secret together, “bring me your next target so we can compare!” 

They skipped off, alone or in pairs, back to their spot on the platform to wait for the next round to begin.

When she stopped to think about it, the whole exercise, Cassian’s comically unoriginal idea to entertain them with air rifles, was a little surreal – a dozen or so small children lined up and shooting at faceless black and white targets, cheered on and encouraged by their peers and mentors. Contextually, however, this was no piece of the rebel propaganda machine – the smiles splayed across the children’s faces were a product of their own skill, drive, and discovery, the encouragement from Cassian was genuine and gentle. None of these children were forced to hold a blaster, to run blindly at an enemy, to put a cause above their own selves. They were still _children_ , Jyn thought, watching as a few of them giggle uncontrollably as they made up a silly hand-slapping game while waiting for their next turn to shoot. This is what the Alliance was fighting for. A life where these children would never have to shoot at anything but a paper target in a sunny field.

What if she had learn to shoot this way, from a tall, floppy-haired man with a soft brown jacket and a beautiful smile? Would she have become the ravenous, paranoid youth she resented for so many years, hoarding her blasters, seeking out her mentor’s praise with body counts and detonator charges? What if her own father had been the one to teach her to shoot – would he have been as patient and clear as Cassian was with these children? Would he have known how to slow your heartrate by counting backwards with each breath until you felt the trigger materialize under your index finger? Had he ever even fired a blaster himself?

Jyn closed her eyes to pull herself from the thought of her father with a blaster in his hand, something she had no memory of. The sun was warm on her skin as she laid back, lacing her hands behind her head. Cassian’s voice drifted quietly in the background as started from ten, counting down each slow breath. 

\- - - - -

“Care to try?” Cassian asked, holding a rifle out to her.

Jyn lazily opened an eye and sat up. Drumming her fingers on her leg, she chewed thoughtfully on her bottom lip. 

“If I can hit the center ring, even just one shot, I get first shower for a week,” she said, eyes bright with competitive fire. Their current base assignment, while perfectly adequate for the Alliance’s needs, lacked only a few things – one of which was a consistent supply of hot water. The private washroom in Cassian’s (and, ostensibly, Jyn’s) quarters was the site of more than a few early morning arguments.

Cassian’s eyes narrowed while a smirk pulled at the corner of his lips. “Four days,” he responded.

“Deal.”

Taking the rifle, Jyn lined up in front of an unused target. The rifle was lighter than she expected having wielded blasters for most of her life. She also wasn’t used to aiming down a sight as Cassian did most of the precision work in the field.

Determined, she widened her stance and turned her body so her right hip led towards the target. She tucked the back of the rifle into her shoulder, lining up the target as best she could through the small sight at the end of the muzzle. The outer circle of the target fell just within the edges of the metal sight. Realizing this was not as easy as it looked, Jyn was impressed with how many of them were consistently hitting the target at all.

“Count backwards from 10,” Cassian said, a hit of sarcasm in his tone.

Jyn thought about slipping an elbow into his ribs but several of the children had stopped shooting to watch her so she decided to do her part to be a better role model. She took a few slow breaths to steady her heartrate and closed her right eye. Resting her left cheek on the rifle, she let out a slow breath, grounding her body through the soles of her feet and palms of her hands. Letting the seconds pass, she waited for her body to calm. She gently squeezed the trigger and was instantly rewarded with a satisfying rip as the pellet passed through the target.

Ten or so shots later the chamber clicked empty and Jyn lowered the rifle, flipping over the safety latch. “Clear,” she said with a grin that Bodhi would probably have described as “shit-eating.” She retrieved the small target and much to her delight had managed to land a shot that just broke the edge of the smallest circle. 

She bounded back to Cassian, triumphantly. 

“Not bad,” he said, looking it over, “still some room for improvement.”

Jyn, aglow with the knowledge that a few days of hot showers awaited her, did not rise to his bait. “Good thing I’ve got an in with the teacher,” she said with a wink.

\- - - - -

“How are we feeling?” Cassian asked the group as they neared the end of class.

“Awful!” a few of them responded in unison. 

“Well the good news is most of you can only get better,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll work on shooting from different positions. Some positions are better than others to keep your body steady. We’ll try standing and kneeling this week and if you all continue to be very well behaved and on time, I’ll teach you how to shoot prone.”

It was clear that most of the children had no idea what Cassian was talking about but they cheered excitedly at the incentive anyways.

“Cassian, Cassain, can you show us _nooooow_??” one of them pleaded and a chorus of pleases and yeses followed. “All right! All right.” he said, giving in to their enthusiasm. “Could my lovely assistant mount a new target for me?” he asked, looking at Jyn. Smiling, she paced the length of the range and clipped a fresh target between the taught wires.

“No pressure, Captain,” Jyn teased as she stepped back onto the shooting platform. Cassian huffed in response and settled onto his stomach.

The group sat cross-legged around Cassian, transfixed in silence as he maneuvered into position. Propped up on elbows, a knee bent out for support, he tucked the butt of the rifle between his cheek and the front crease of his shoulder. He sat still for several seconds and the children leaned forward in anticipation. Tilting his right eye over the rifle and down the sight, Cassian let out several quick shots in rapid succession. “Clear,” he said, locking the safety on the rifle. The children cheered and raised their hands as they clambered to volunteer to retrieve the target.

When the lucky volunteer returned with the target they handed it over, a little confused. “Cassian you didn’t hit the middle!” they said, almost sadly.

“I wasn’t trying to,” he responded. “What do you see?”

The children crowded around him as he held out the target. Laughter erupted as they discovered Cassian had drawn a smiling face, two shots for eyes and the rest for a mouth, framed perfectly on the target. 

\- - - - -

“Andor!” Draven’s voice carried across the hanger bay. Cassian, head and shoulders inside the underbelly of his U-wing, untangled himself and popped out.

“Sir?” he asked, wiping the grease from his hands on a rag at his belt.

“I was asked to give you this,” Draven said, holding out a folded piece of paper. 

Cassian took the paper, skeptically – orders were always verbal, and in the rare occasion they were written, it was on a data pad, never on paper. He cautiously unfolded it.

The paper was a shooting target. Written in neat letters along the top was “Thank You Captain Andor!” The target itself was covered with small, medium, and large names, scrawled in a dozen versions of choppy, unsteady handwriting. Children’s handwriting. 

Draven gave him a short but knowing nod, leaving Cassian alone with a warm feeling in his heart as he read and re-read each of the names.


End file.
